17 g - DARKLIGHT (1st sequel to TRH)
by teddybowties
Summary: The Doctor learns to Rejoice in the Sun.
1. prologue

Prologue: Red Sign in the Mooring

Letters in red.

They fly in the face of the dusk outside.

Flamina can feel them, calling her to slip deeper, to find them out. To dare and wipe them off the wall.

K.O.L.M.

But she cannot see them.

Are they being spoken?

Cannot hear them.

The light outside is violet and pale, bled through by clouds of loud red.

Flamina cannot fathom their twisting way along her neural pathways, their floating forays along the dust already settling in her sleeping mind.

Already, her hand is scrabbling in the sheets, wild. Variable. Lashing out.

Sweat stings in her eyes, bringing salt and random sensations. She blinks.

The soft of pillowcase.

The hard of the Master's absence last night.

A middle toe that nearly froze because the coverlet came off sometime in the night.

Her fingers spill over the thickness of the closest heavy bed post, white nails crouching like a hungry spider as awake fills her brain.

She rubs a white hand through her long white hair and glances at the window instinctively, buttering herself up for the cold flush of daylight.

But there are no twin suns winking drunk eyes through the glass at her, blinding her with the daylight.

No. the dark is still there, the chorus of twilight.

And, no stars.

"Still night," she murmurs, dazed as she calls out to the wall panel to light the room, "...bright, 30 to 35 per cent."

No light, no light.

"Wall panel, restore settings!"

Still no light.

And now, the room, still dark, seeks to threaten her with its mounting emptiness.

Shrugging into the bed sheet like daddy taught her, Flamina falls out of bed and finds a wall after a tumble over air and some resultant fondling of the carpet.

On her knees now, she heads for a corner, feeling around.

Feel, touch, hear.

Feel, touch, hear.

Stop.

Fluff. Probably carpet. No,no... too smooth. It's that pile of silk underthings she bought the Master but never wrapped because he failed to show last night. And now that she's looking for it, the big red bow is still there, shining sadly in the not-light.

Pity.

The carpet, not the underthings.

Because her foot feels cold.

She must have knocked her water mussing about near her bed in the dark.

Her hands lift her up, along the solid flat of wall near a raised indentation.

"Ah, the door panel!" she cries, hitting the signature triangle button of the manual lock.

It's rather like an elevator... the thought bubbles from somewhere. She ignores it.

The entry sticks, then slides, spilling Flamina half out of doors and into the silvery hallway.

"Aunty River always had a pie in the TARDIS icebox for me..." she breathes as she stands up, then pulls up the sheet she's draped toga-style around herself, "...it's a long shot, but maybe the kitchenette for this floor is operational again... damn thing was on the fritz yesterday, I remember it buzzing and sparking..."

The shadows are long in the hall that leads to the food machine, however, and her wings are not out.

The breath on her tongue is cold ice between her teeth.

She inhales frost suddenly, and the sound of footsteps behind her rattles her brains.

Half asleep, she remembers what was instilled into her bones by the Doctor, and takes it to hearts.

Her pounding legs carry her down by the north stairwell, her naked feet slapping against the slick tiles of the Panopticon's third floor of apartments.

Descent.

Descent.

Descent.

Draw the enemy into a trap.

Blind with purpose she gallops in a downward springing circle, a white horse amid trees of silver and stone.

Wet, warm, thick liquid gushes through her toes and she loses her balance, falling into the private teleport panel sometimes used to access the Panopticon more quickly from the central stair.

Her face immediately slams the three-prong slit in the floor that conceals the Eye.

She touches the bruise, squeaking as an arc of dark blood follows her fingertip and morbidly rubbing thumb from the floor, as though the gravity's been displaced.

It's... not hers.

She looks up, following the strange trail of blood as it floats up from the ground, such a strange thing.

But there is one way it could happen.

If the person who lost it was still alive... or immortal.

Her eyes glaze like iced pottery as she follows the blood farther up its line of resolve, up, up, up.

Beyond the high windows, the rows of stout benches perched under stone canopies.

Beyond the arches that support the Panopticon's emerald dome.

Beyond all of this, Flamina stares at the thing dangling from the place where the pod fell.

For there in the top of the dome, there is strung the flayed remains of a singular presence, a hawk among pigeons.

Cat among rats.

Man among minstrels and thieves.

That man is Rassilon, dripping backwards, his wet bones bunched like exotic carrots under that purple robe as they rebuild themselves from flesh assumingly repurposed from nearby matter. Her... father.

She looks down at the floor again, realising she's missed it, in the semi-dark.

There is another man, naked at her feet, stained, she presumes, by the climbing blood. Or perhaps a wound.

He is shivering and unconscious.

The only man she would scream for.

As a figure in guard's silvers sprints across from the hall she came from, she cries out.

"You! Get me Medical, now, quickl-hmph!"

One silver glove plunges down her throat in a surge of liquid.

Another rips the Egg of Law from her neck, leaving a red dent.

And as she is dragged away, one tight cheek of her bared rump squeaks and bumps intermittently across the smooth tiles.

Weee-heee-eek.

Weee-heee-eek.

Weee-heee...


	2. ch 01

Chapter One: Red-Handed

"Look there, my Lord...," a voice squeals, "... he's waking up."

But the screech of a bucket being scrabbled over by small feet is the first thing the Doctor hears.

"What happened? Did the Ceremony turn out well?" he breathes, pushing up against the wall to a sitting position, "... forgive me, but I don't remember leaving..."

Eyes turn on each other, Borusa's and a helmeted guard's, trading worrying glances of blue daylight and silver metal unibrow, respectively.

"... you didn't leave. You had to be carried out after collapsing during your official reading of the Last and Final Remarks Regarding Induction of New Officials. Just a small little tear, really, but it forced us, with Flamina's consent, to delay the rest of the proceedings. How do you feel?"

The Doctor rubs his gritty eyes and yawns.

"I don't remember doing that."

He reaches up to check his head for lumps and bits of dried blood, but Borusa slaps his hand away with an exasperated exhalation about a bruise.

"I wouldn't go touching things now..." she mutters, standing on a suspect wooden pail as she pushes his rabbit hair away from his temples, "... the fall gave you quite a concussion. But now you're awake, it ought to heal fairly quickly, so if you can put on clothes without falling, do so. Then go with the guard to the Lesser Inquiries Room. I need to discuss something with you about a new issue that's fallen into our lap and all my materials are there. Take care, Doctor."

As Borusa leaves, the Doctor blinks once, twice, holding the movement so he can make sense of the words floating in his head.

His lips move without him.

"Borusa, room, clothes..."

He slides to the edge of the bed.

Then he looks over, and...

The helmeted guard, a woman, sticks out a hand and presses him back into place upright, propping his wobbly frame easily as though he were a fancy layer cake in a spring form pan.

"Now, now, Lord Borusa told me to keep you still as much as possible, and she strictly forbid any bending over... remember you're not strong... like me," the brown-haired female guard's young, smoky voice mutters from the helmet as she bends to rummage in a plain chest stained a rich, dark cherry, "... I'll find you something decent- you just hold tight."


	3. ch 02

Chapter Two: Red Inquisition

Thirty minutes later, the Doctor's fingers clamp nauseous and white on the Lesser Inquiries Room door.

"...I'm here," he says, carefully pushing the door a bit further ajar before sticking a naked foot in to keep it that way. "I think the guard has left me. Don't really want to turn around to be sure. When did we get her? She's creepy."

Borusa smiles at her little table, not bothering to get up.

"Take a seat, fool boy," Borusa says, gesturing to a wooden chair, "you and your bare toes, both."

She then lays a paper down, something about ... disappearances? Climate change?

His eyes blur as he tries to focus on the page, but Borusa slides it away from him, watching his reaction.

"Not that, not... yet. I sense you have a question. Best be out with it boy," she says, tapping his hand with the pointer in her fingers, because her small hand is too short to reach his, "with that look on your face, you haven't all day, let alone the hour or so it would take for this. I'll hurry it up. Go ahead and ask."

She smiles, turning her eyes down at him.

Strange.

The Doctor blinks again, thinks better of shaking his head to clear it, and then sinks back into the chair, slowly tilting back against the high rest for a moment before opening his eyes and speaking.

"...where is Koschei? Last time I checked, he was miserably in love. He should have been there last night. Why wasn't he? Or..."

He jerks forward just as two guards come in, the one from before and another one.

"Surely he wasn't one of those disappearances, Borusa... hey!"

Both guards plaster their hands to his head and chest, holding him down and covering his mouth.

But not before he manages to catch a finger between his teeth.

He chomps it. Irately.

The guard he bit stumbles back, striking the wall with their helmet and breaking the opaque glass. The impact reveals a left eye, dark-glazed and gunning for his bowels on a spit.

The guard with the broken helmet jumps up from the floor and rushes him, but he shoves his fingers in the break in the mask, touching cold skin.

Cold, and white.

As he touches the Flesh, something bursts in front of him, an explosion of snow and red boots. A little girl running near a frozen lake. A scared little girl. Running.

He tries to call to her, but suddenly he feels monstrous fingers grip him by the spine, lifting him one-handed.

Inevitably, his flying spine crashes into a nearby wall, followed by the rest of him.

"The Doctor doesn't ask for directions," he murmurs, sinking to the floor like a brick of old custard pudding.

And then the lights go out.

How predictable.


	4. ch 03

Chapter Three: The Blue Lacuna

The Doctor opens his eyes to a rush of iced air on his cheeks.

The cold touch of the breeze, though pleasant, bites him, burning his skin with the fire inherent in every long winter.

He opens his eyes.

He can't feel his toes to curl them on the slide-y thick black ice.

Clouds melt overhead, buffeting the scene on the lake with snow.

Covering them both.

A bright figure made of incandescent blue feathers and steely eyes and sharp beak, held up by pawing talons pressed flat to the ice.

His partner, it appears, is a giant bluebird.

He stares at it, forgetting his bluish toes now in the dull brilliance of the frozen streams cascading down like frosty curtains.

He takes a wingtip in his strangely furry glove, and curls the morbid covering gently over the primaries; there is a bit of bone in there, careful- we mustn't break it.

His eyes curtail themselves, hoping not to catch another glimpse of the furry thing on his hand.

But look he does.

Gray.

Soft-bristled.

Wizened.

Furled toward itself.

"My kingdom for some proper mittens!" he calls out to the giant bird, whose visible eye rounds on him disapprovingly like Sauron in an apron, a taut feminine presence in blue, selfish and in communicado with the whole of some wrinkled, wispen world of wonders.

It doesn't take much to begin.

Just a flick of his monkey's paw, a twist on his naked heel, and they are dancing.

He spins the big bluebird round, tucking her body against himself so that she must release a wing to stay upright.

She flings into it, swirling flamenco spiral after flamenco spiral to his tapping, clapping swing.

As he tosses her upward in a catch, his reflection on the black ice decides it for him; yes, he's still quite dapper in formal blacks... even if he doesn't have any shoes.

Suddenly the echo of a projectile bang alights on the snowy heights, hurtling in a beam toward them.

One wing folds around him in a blast of warmth, and a crunching pounds through his ear.

A small arch of dark red liquid flutters out in an arc from the wing, but it pushes him, flinging his rag doll body like a paper ball to the far shore.

The bird cocks her head at him, a blue helmet of ruffed feathers set by a lovely gold jewel.

Then the ice splits in little waves of cracks that crawl toward him, larger and larger fronds of interrupted shatter carving their way across the fracturing lake like hounds toward his overhanging toes.

Wanting very much to keep those little piggies, he pulls up, wiggling a bit, then sinks into the snow on the bank, and groans, shoving his hand through his rabbit hair so hard it knocks away his lovely headgear, an elegant black beaver.

"Darling," he murmurs to the receding cracks and beneath them, his missing bluebird, "... don't let them dent my topper!"

Then, before the little icicles can form on his eyelashes and bore him to suicide with stories of the war, he scoops up his hat with a swaggering backhand and casts it, skidding fair out, just in time to catch what's left of the rather unfortunate fishing hole before it ices over again.


	5. ch 04

Chapter Four: Am I Blue?

"All hail the blinking blue button..." the bedraggled woman in the cast mutters in a low, mocking voice, enunciating each consonant with enough force to make her dribble spit.

The woman in white ignores her, taking out a notebook and checking a few boxes instead.

"Now Miss, your physician is on vacation, so I will just have to be your attendee for the moment all right? You'll be happy you came here, just sit there and I'll bring your medication."

The dirty-blonde woman in the cast applies clean fingernails to its rough wrapping, dragging each digit down the length of the plaster, making rents.

The woman in white breathes in and breathes out again hard, hard enough to make it seem as though she may be a little frustrated. Good, good. Everything is fine. She is a nurse, this is... she is a nurse.

"It's time to take your medication, my dear..." the nurse says flatly, whipping out a thermometer from the white, white wall and stuffing it in the casted woman's mouth.

"Oh my, I'm afraid I'll need to step out and call him back in..."

"And leave me to unwrap my own presents? That's rude... ," says the woman in the cast, nipping like a feral dog as she applies her prominent, clean, white teeth to the strips of bandage dangling from her plastered arm. "And 'he's' not my Doctor. My Doctor's a burglar. And a magpie. A hero and a clown. But mostly an idiot. And 'I' am the one who labels his nuts and bolts, and cooks his turkey, and does his laundry, and looks after his strays, not a little brown mouse like you. You should run, little mouse. You and your doctor both."

Her gold-lit eyes float over the nametag on the nurse's uniform, reflected in the mirror, and she touches her tongue to the tips of her teeth suggestively as she reads,

"Influences, Jar."

She laughs aloud as she stares after the nurse's retreating form through the bars on her door.

Then she remembers a couple of rhymes, and makes a sandwich of them, calling out through the bars.

"For I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down- the better to eat you with my dear and oh look! This is me..." she growls, candid and snarling against the bars, though the nurse is long gone. So she continues her lunch, offering a bite to the one who's still watching, curling her fingers around the steel and grinning her white teeth like lights from behind calculating, juicy lips, mongrel and plump.

"Dinner Lady."


	6. ch 05

Chapter Five: White Christmas at the Ivory Tower

The Museum, a beacon of enlightenment situated on Gallifrey's white northern cliffs, has never before seen the like of the great big box wrapped in shiny foil now sitting on its front step.

Another 'box' it knows well dropped that thing by.

So heavy, it is.

Big, boxy box.

Like two people could fit inside it. Why would two of those silly mortals want to do that?

Sleeping in a people-sized box.

It's absurd.

Well, better to ask the spinny blue rectangle of a harlot that left them here, in that shiny strange box, with that floaty paper thing tied to it by a ribbon. How dare one of those pesky mortals kick some strange shiny box out on the Museum's front step!

Shameful.

And what is that shadow circling like one of those damn southern vultures overhead?

No! No! Don't...

Something white lands on a busted column, splashing softly.

Damn bird.

And it's that pesky Myrtlegull too.

Is it landing?

Oh skies above, it is.

The flight feathers of the annoying bird circle downward, elevating, flopping back, descending as the bird descends.

Perhaps it won't... land on the Museum. Perhaps it...

Yes, the strange shiny box!

Yes yes, bird, land there!

LAND. THERE. BIRD.

The shadow thickens like a miracle over the shiny box.

The shadow falls, straight down, gliding strangely downward, over the strange box, strangely.

Almost not like a bird at all.

The Museum is certain of it.

The bird-thing is white, and monstrous... and as its one eye peers down at the big big big goldish bow tied snugly atop the shiny box it now is stomping about on, it snaps up the tag in its beak and stares back at it, as if remembering the words.

Good Boy.

Merry Christmas.

Do not open till...

...

The stupid creature! It then drops the card and claws at it, flattening its talon across the words, almost... as though its tiny subdivided lentil of a brain comprehends.

Then the beak.

Oh, the horror!

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

The terror in that turn of head! The malicious, plotting twist of neck as it pounds out its relentless chorus of resounding misery on the box, right on that blinding bloody no good tinfoil paper, in a catchy beat of four.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

...

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

...

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.

Peck.


	7. ch 06

Chapter Six: The Big White Telephone

"Here," a sweet voice mumbles through the bars, "I brought you some water."

Ice splashes wetly across the Doctor's face, and his head smacks back, hitting stone.

He blinks away the water, staring as the naked white skin of his lovely not-daughter parades itself around, like an armor suit of meat, on the wrong side of the bars.

"Do you remember when I made you your pretty dress? It was your birthday...," he murmurs softly, averting his gaze with a hand, as if trying not to stare out to sea.

Flamina's white fingers wrap around the bars, curling loose, then tight. They pull.

The thick bars rattle free with a clang and no small bit of dust, clouding up a bit.

"Don't tell me what to do, Daddy. We're too old for this game," she breathes, tossing the wall of bars and stone behind her, causing a racket somewheres.

"Well you can tell your mother I don't like the furniture. Bit too garish. Needs addressing."

He mutters it under his breath, watching her watch him as he plucks at the dirty blue bathrobe that's all they've dressed him in.

Flamina smiles, and draws her ankle back, dipping her foot so smoothly along the floor, touching toes to the stones.

Her foot then returns to its former position, and finds his solar plexus, kicking him there, in the middle of his ribs.

The blow scoots him toward the back wall and instinct curves him in on himself, and so he holds his arms close to his lower chest.

"You're not yourself today. But we could still be friends. What say you put this behind us, and we can get some ice cream? Just tell me where the TARDIS is, and-.. glug!"

Her fist shoves violently into his stomach, forcing a little trickle of blood to come up and bubble between his shivering teeth, spraying all over her hand.

"Flamina?" he says softly, looking up at her with red smudges on his face.

So calm. As if he knows... But he can't. He can't! He... can't know. He... must not...

He knows. He has to. How? How did he find out? It was... perfect.

Despite herself, her fingers unbuckle themselves from that fist and slacken, riding limply along her lower thigh. Dimly she can feel her face beginning to revert, losing cohesion temporarily. If he sees her now, the way she really looks...

"You're not really a clown, are you, Doctor?" she asks, looking down at him.

But his head has lolled.

He is asleep.


End file.
